by John Lutz
That was what made the thing about Etty all the more persistent. If only they’d had some few years together instead of the few months…. He remembered Etty’s father, Henry Card, a hard Baptist rock of a man, and his endless biblical philosophizing after the accident.
Wintone tilted back his head and stared up at the finely cracked ceiling. “The Lord taketh away.” The Lord had taken Etty and her softness from Wintone, taken what had given a joyous pattern to his life, taken the only future that meant anything. On Route 44 the Lord had been an over-the-road tractor-trailer with diesel stacks; on Route 44 the Lord had slammed down His fist like a sledgehammer. On Etty, not Wintone.
As in a relentless TV news film he was forced to watch, Wintone again saw the flames, again heard the screams that had meant so little to him at the time as he stumbled about the highway shoulder. An intersection collision, impossible to say whose fault. A hand, an arm, supporting him; Malloby, a state trooper he vaguely knew; Malloby staring hard into his face. “Listen, Billy, I ain’t gonna ask you …” And Wintone had been drinking before the accident; Wintone and nobody else knew that for a provable fact, and nobody including Wintone knew if he’d been drunk enough for it to affect his driving. He had nodded numbly, hadn’t had to take the inhalator test to determine if he was legally drunk, legally and morally responsible for Etty’s death. “Jesus …” the dazed truck driver had repeated over and over, “Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …” And a county sheriff hadn’t had to take the test that any other driver would have been required to take, that would have fixed responsibility or innocence; and Wintone wished to Jesus now that he had taken the test, wished now that he could know one way or the other, so eventually he might forget.
Wintone hadn’t seen or talked to his father-in-law since the funeral.
The swivel chair squealed as the sheriff dropped his weight forward, rested his elbows on the scarred desk top. What he’d had the crazy urge to do after the funeral was to take his shotgun, knife and fishing gear and disappear into the deep woods along Big Water Lake, simply disappear, from himself, from everyone. There were dark places there, shady and cool, where nothing in this world could find him. But he hadn’t done that; he wasn’t a man to surrender to senseless impulse.
So Wintone sought his escape in sleep; he dreamed less often now. He lowered his head into the cradle of his folded arms on the desk, and in the morning he awoke on the cot in the next room, neither remembering nor caring how he’d got there.
The cedar frame of the cot groaned like something dying as Wintone rolled onto his side and sat up, raking his fingers lightly over his sleep-swollen features as if to check for changes. After a brief, cold shower and a quick shave, Wintone felt better. He felt good enough to put on a fresh uniform and to walk down to Turper’s Grill and have scrambled eggs and gravy biscuits for breakfast.
There were several fishermen breakfasting at the counter at Turper’s, dressed in expensive city-bought outdoors clothing and talking about the insurance business. A vacationing family—man, wife and teen-age daughter—sat in one of the booths by the window, eating in silence. The place where Wintone customarily sat at the counter was taken, so he ate at one of the small tables near the door. From time to time he’d look up and watch Velda’s bubblelike henna hairdo moving back and forth behind the tall serving-shelf from the kitchen, much like a balled-up artificial animal in a shooting gallery.
It was nine o’clock when Wintone ordered a cup of black coffee to go and carried it back to his office.
Things to do. Nate Graham had claimed some city fishermen had trespassed to fish his private lake, and after he’d chased them off in none too friendly a fashion one of his milk cows had turned up dead of a bullet wound. He’d managed to find out the name of one of one of the fishermen, and though they’d gone back to Saint Joseph the next day, Graham had filed charges. Paperwork for the state, enough to keep Wintone occupied for over an hour hunt-and-pecking on his old Royal typewriter.
After that Rufe Davis, proprietor of Colver General Merchandise and Colver’s postmaster, came by with the day’s mail and sat for a long chat, talking mostly about how his business had picked up and how hellish hot it was getting outside. When he was gone, Wintone leisurely opened his mail with his pocketknife and scanned the various colorful ads and form letters with disinterest. He had no need for a new anything, really. The tools of his trade were basic.
It was just past noon when old Bonifield crossed the street toward the sheriff’s office with his curiously agile, limping gait. Sweat had streaked his grizzled, lean face and he was walking fast, bent slightly forward, nervously shifting his usual large wad of chewing tobacco from cheek to cheek behind set lips.
He threw open the office door with a suddenness that startled and momentarily angered Wintone.
THREE
WINTONE SAT AND LISTENED. Craziness here. What old Bonifield was yammering about couldn’t be true. The sheriff decided to let the old man talk until he ran down.
Lazily rubbing a forefinger along the side of his nose, Wintone speculated that maybe it was the combination of afternoon heat and morning alcohol that had ignited old Bonifield’s imagination.
Quite a story he was telling, about a boy who’d been attacked at the lake by something that sounded as if it came right out of a late-night horror movie. Wintone had heard this sort of almost incoherent ranting before from Bonifield when the old man had been drinking hard. What did worry the sheriff was that a boy might have been hurt badly somewhere in some other fashion. Though even that part of Bonifield’s tale was probably so much wind.
“It be true, Sheriff!” Bonifield shouted, sensing Wintone’s doubt.
“Ain’t always easy to know what’s true,” Wintone said.
“You’ll be knowin’ when you see the body.” Bonifield opened the front door for a moment, rattling the blinds against the window, and spat an amber arc of chewing tobacco into the street.
Wintone resented him letting the heat in against the hardworking air conditioner. “I wish you’d left the body,” he said, not knowing himself if he was trying to humor old Bonifield. “…Make things easier.”
“He were still alive when we found him, I told you, screamin’ on about what come up outa the lake an’ attacked him. When he quit screamin’ an’ closed his eyes we didn’t know if he be dead or not, so we figured we oughta bring him on in to Doc Amis.”
“Uh-hm. If he’s as tore up as you say and wasn’t dead at the lake,” Wintone said, “he’s bound to be now after the ride over rough road in Joe James’s pickup truck. You shoulda sent somebody in to get the doc.”
What passed over old Bonifield’s lined face unsettled Wintone. A kind of fear and shame that suggested that maybe none of the men had had the courage to stay at the scene of whatever had or hadn’t happened to the boy. And Wintone knew that none of them were cowards. Old Bonifield’s wild story, in those few seconds, gained a certain chilling credibility.
Brakes squealed outside and a tinny-sounding door slammed. Through the slanted blinds Wintone saw the dented black roof of Joe James’s rusty pickup truck. Car doors slammed. Old Bonifield had already shuffled his stooped, whipcord figure out the door, leaving it hanging open for Wintone like an unfriendly invitation.
As he stepped outside, the heat hit Wintone like a soft hammer that continued to press. He was reminded again that he was forty-one and tilting to overweight.
“See here now, Sheriff!”
Bonifield was leaning over the bed of the old pickup and pointing, a look of triumph on his creased and stubbled face, a glint of wildness in his surprisingly alert blue eyes.
Joe James, a heavyset man with a red face and no eyebrows, stepped aside for Wintone to move in close. “He were dead when we hoisted him into the truck, Sheriff,” James said with a sad tension. “Figured it best to stop here first.”
“Figured right,” Wintone said, staring at what was in the bed of the pickup. Wintone had seen a lot. He looked away. Bonifield had said
the boy’s eyes were closed. The eyes of the dead thing in the pickup bed were open. Maybe the jarring ride had done that.
“Boy about twelve,” Sonny Tibbet said. He had been in the truck cab with Joe James and was with him when the screams had led the men to discover the boy on the bank of Big Water Lake. “Wonder what did that to him, did all that an’ took his leg near off? …”
“Somethin’ bad,” Bonifield said, “real bad….”
“Animal?” Joe James ventured.
Bonifield spat. “Animal, hell! Boy said it come up outa the lake at him, said that ’fore he died.”
The sun seemed to be getting hotter by the second, and already an unpleasant odor was rising from the bed of the truck.
“Take the remains on to Doc Amis, Joe,” Wintone said. “Take Bonifield, too. Sonny, come on into the office. Cool in there.”
Sonny Tibbet was a shade over Wintone’s six foot two, even a shade huskier, but not as hard a man. He owned the sawmill his dad had owned before him, and he had Wintone’s respect. They went back a way together, back to when they were in school.
Sonny squinted and yanked at a lock of curly black hair. Old habit. “Is cool in here,” he said, settling down into the hickory chair opposite Wintone’s desk.
Wintone sat and rolled a ball-point pen back and forth between his thumb and little finger over the scarred mahogany desk top, trying not to think of what he’d seen in the pickup bed. He leaned back in his creaking wood chair and got right to official business. Cold facts were best for burying nightmare images. “What all happened down at the lake, Sonny?”
“We was goin’ down to inspect our trout lines we put out last night. Old Bonifield had some lines out, too, an’ me an’ Joe James met him on the path to Lynn Cove.” Sonny bunched his body in a way Wintone didn’t like. “That’s when we heard the screamin’, an’ another sound, like splashin’ an’ a kind of groanin’—real low, not the boy groanin’. We run there fast as we could an’ found the boy pretty much like you saw him but alive. He was ravin’, said he was fishin’ an’ somethin’ come up outa the lake an’ got him, somethin’ big an’ dark. Joe pulled me aside, said he figured the boy wouldn’t live long enough for us to get Doc Amis an’ bring him back, so we decided to bring him on in with Joe’s pickup. We put an old blanket an’ some rags in back so’s to soften the ride, but I knew the boy was dead when we loaded him in—too much blood lost.”
“Know who the boy was?”
Sonny shook his head, yanked unconsciously at his hair. “Wasn’t any identification on him. We thought he must be the son of somebody in that bunch stayin’ at Higgins’ Motel.”
Wintone’s insides seemed to twist and he cringed. He would have the unpleasant task of checking that out and notifying the boy’s family. “What was it you think got him?” he asked.
Sonny shrugged. “That comin’ up outa the water business’d be the boy’s imagination. He was ravin’, busted up the way he was.”
Bonifield had come back from Doc Amis’s and was standing leaning against the wall near the cork bulletin board. “Doc Amis says he ain’t seen nothin’ like it … jaws an’ claws, is what he says … boy been put through a grinder.”
Wintone thought about running Bonifield out of the office but decided against the effort. Besides, he might have some questions to put to the old man.
“Tell the good sheriff ’bout the footprint,” Bonifield said. “Though it weren’t no footprint, nor paw, neither.”
Sonny nodded. “There was a print, Sheriff, leastways one clear one, on the bank near where the boy was layin’. Rest of the ground was soft an’ all churned up.”
“So,” Wintone said, “what kind of print?”
Sonny hesitated and shook his head. “No kind I ever seen.”
“Big, though,” Bonifield said. “Six, eight inches across. An’ deep, like the thing were somethin’ heavy.”
Wintone grunted. “How ’bout goin’ back up there,” he said to Sonny. “Make sure nobody messes things up around where it happened. I got some people to talk to an’ I’ll be along.”
After a moment Sonny nodded. “I’ll get Joe James to go with me. We’ll take his truck.”
“I’m goin’ down to Mully’s an’ get a drink,” Bonifield said.
Heat rolled in before Sonny and Bonifield slammed the door behind them, rattling the blinds. On the warm windowpane a bluebottle fly crawled across the loop of the R in SHERRIFF. Wintone picked up the phone like it was something slimy.
Lil Higgins answered the telephone, and Wintone had to wait awhile for Luke to come in from where he was working on one of the cabins. Then he told Wintone that the couple in cabin eight, the Larsens, had been inquiring since morning about the whereabouts of their eleven-year-old son, Dale. Higgins confirmed that the boy was blond—that was really all the description that Wintone could give him. Wintone told Higgins not to mention the phone call to the boy’s family and said he’d be on his way up there shortly.
Wintone stood wearily and strapped on his holstered .38 revolver. He ran broad fingers through his brown curls, pulled the leather holster strap tight and adjusted the weight of the pistol on his hip. Then he went out into the heat, careful to shut the door tight behind him, and set out walking toward Doc Amis’s.
He was in front of Lige Thompson’s Ozark Used Furniture store and already sticky with sweat when a low red sports car slowed to keep pace with him. There were two men in it who looked to be in their middle twenties, each with a flowing dark mustache, and several fishing rods were lashed to a chrome carrier on the car’s roof.
“Hey, Marshall,” the driver called, “is there anyplace to buy bottle liquor in this metropolis?”
Wintone kept walking. “Colver Liquor and Tobacco Shop, three blocks over.”
“How about that dive over there?” The man extended his arm from the car to point toward Mully’s.
“No carry-out liquor there, nor hard liquor at all,” Wintone said, “only bottle beer in mugs.”
“Bottle beer in mugs …” the driver repeated as if in disbelief. The sports car suddenly seemed to drop six inches and the engine hummed louder as it sped away. It occurred to Wintone that there was no speed limit posted anywhere in Colver except where the little-traveled alternate highway cut through the town’s center.
When Wintone arrived at Doc Amis’s, he noticed that the twice-lightning-struck, huge cottonwood tree that shaded the low brick building looked as if it might be dying from the drought. Its leaves appeared wilted and had taken on a dull brownish hue out near the ends of the long branches.
Doc Amis’s nurse and receptionist, Sarah Ledbetter, didn’t look up as Wintone entered. A thin, almost skinny, woman with close-cropped blond hair, pretty in an intense way, she was busy at her desk entering something in a large black-bound record book, and her hands were unsteady. When she did glance up and saw Wintone in the small, comfortable anteroom, she smiled and laid the pen in the crease of the open book’s binding.
“Didn’t hear you come in, Billy.”
“Didn’t make much noise.”
She gave him a flickering up-and-down glance with almost a mother’s concern in wide blue eyes that were penetrating in their sensitivity. “You look worn down.”
“Worn down’s what I am. Doc keepin’ you busy, Sarah?”
“Busier’n I wanted to be today.”
Wintone smiled a bit of sadness and nodded. He was at ease in Sarah’s company. They had gone together for over a year when they were in their teens, when touching each other had been a bona fide black-sky sin instead of something like shaking hands the way it was now. Wintone sometimes wondered which attitude was worse.
A horizontal frown-line appeared on Sarah’s forehead, softened but stayed when she stopped frowning and looked up at Wintone. “I haven’t seen anything as bad as that boy for a long time.” She had spent three years as an RN in Kansas City after nursing school, and Wintone was surprised to see her upset. But then a person’s capacity to e
ndure a sight like the boy’s remains probably lessened if the senses weren’t kept dulled by frequent similar sights. Wintone could understand that; he remembered the dead return gaze from the back of Joe James’s pickup truck and almost shivered.
A door behind and to the left of Sarah opened, and Doc Amis came into the anteroom and nodded a hello to Wintone. The doctor was a tall, hawk-nosed man in his late sixties, very erect and very gray. It seemed that every year he got some straighter in the back and some grayer, but never older.
“That boy looks like he’s been put through a threshing machine,” the doctor said. “What happened to him?”
Wintone crossed hamlike forearms. “Somethin’ attacked him down at Big Water Lake.”
“Something big, judging by the slashes and tooth marks.”
“What do you figure it was? Pack of dogs?”
“Not dogs. Something bigger. Hard to say just what.”
“What was the cause of death, Doc?”
Doc Amis snorted. “Take your pick, Sheriff. Without going into unpleasant details, it could have been anything from shock to loss of blood.”
“The men who got there right after it happened said the boy told them somethin’ came up out of the lake after him while he was fishin’.”
Sarah, who had been intently following the conversation, looked questioningly at Wintone.
“Could it have been a bear?” Wintone asked Doc Amis.
“No bears around here.”
“Cougar?”
“Definitely not. I’ve seen the work of cougar on a man. All I can say, Billy, is whatever it was had the tools to do more damage than a cougar. It’s hard for me to believe the boy could have lived long enough to tell anybody anything, but it happens.”
“And it’s not good when it happens,” Sarah said.
Wintone caught the undertone of helpless compassion in her voice, wanted to ease her mind but didn’t know what to say. “See if you can do something with what’s left of him,